英语外刊阅读精讲：美式幽默(原声音频)

2018-10-04 09:26:00来源：新东方在线

　　【时尚生活】：美式幽默，妙讽星巴克

　　【本期导读】：说说美式幽默的尖酸刻薄

　　美国人的幽默和英国人的幽默大不相同，英式幽默有些古板、有点儿冷，美式幽默则尖酸刻薄，有点贫，这类文章见得不多，今天我们讲一篇小文，题目叫Starbucks Shines in our Ecosystem of Snobbery，题目起得精彩，文字写得刻薄，一起领略美式幽默！发布时间稍早，但是文字超好，文章略长，有删节。选自《华盛顿邮报》，且听黄培辰老师的本期解读。更多双语阅读资料，可点击查看：《双语阅读：英语外刊阅读精讲汇总》

　　英语原文：

　　Indiana’s Thomas R. Marshal, who was America’s vice president 100 years ago, voiced---he plucked it from a Hoosier humorist---one of the few long-remembered utterances to issue from that office: “What this country needs is a good five-percent cigar.” A century later, what the country needs is a $12 12-ounce cup of coffee.

　　Today, you cannot swing a dead cat without hitting a Starbuck store. There are 25,000 in 75 countries, with another 12,000 due by 2021, so Starbucks is not an elusive or exclusive experience. This poses a problem, and an opportunity. Seattle, where the original Starbuck was opened in 1971, now has a Starbucks Reserve Roastery and Tasting Room where customers can turn a cup of “small-batch” coffee into an experience---Starbuck sells experiences as much as coffee---of both conspicuous consumption and conspicuous connoisseurship. Bloomberg reports that for a pittance, a.k.a, $10, a skinflint will be able to buy a cold-brew coffee, which presumably is an excellent thing, infused with nitrogen gas, which sounds like an acquired taste.

　　Very pricey coffee is just a fresh-brewed variation on the familiar phenomenon of positional goods. They are necessarily, inherently enjoyments for the few. They exist because, particularly in the upper reaches of affluent societies, it is not love that makes the world go round, it is a compound of envy and pretentiousness.

双语阅读：英语外刊阅读精讲(附音频)